The Last Diet.: Discover the Secret to Losing Weight - For Good

By Shahroo Izadi

Replace shame and guilt with self-compassion to change the way you think about weight loss


Author Shahroo Izadi presents a new approach losing weight—without ever telling you what or how to eat. In The Last Diet., she shares how the same evidence-based tools she used effectively with her clients who struggle with addiction helped her to lose over a hundred pounds, increase her self-esteem, and transform her habits around food and negative self-talk.

Diets often offer quick, short-term fixes and so-called miracle cures, but the real challenge is managing weight and changing habits over a sustained period of time. Everybody's journeys and needs are different: it’s about shifting the way we communicate with ourselves and our bodies every single day, in every aspect of our lives. Shahroo’s revolutionary kindness method gives readers the tools to embrace self-kindness and self-respect and in doing so change the narrative of health.

Using a custom-tailored plan, The Last Diet. will help you identify where your unhealthy habits come from, teach you how change them, and show you what to do when you slip up. Shahroo guides you through every step, helping you to draw out your own wisdom and find motivation to change your long-term habits and lose weight – for good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250252005

Shahroo Izadi

Shahroo Izadi is a Behavioural Change Specialist and author of The Kindness Method, which has been translated into five languages and was a Shelf Help Club book of the month. She started her career in the NHS before setting up her private practice. Her therapeutic approach is influenced by her frontline addiction treatment work in clinical, community and prison settings. During this time, Shahroo developed a knowledge of how to ellicit self-led change, even in those who are most resistant to it. She shares how the same evidence-based tools she used effectively with her clients in active addiction helped her to lose eight stone in weight, increase her self-esteem and help her self-manage a range of unwanted habits around food and negative self-talk. Shahroo's work has been featured widely on BBC Radio1, the Telegraph, Psychologies and Red Magazine and she ran a sell-out workshop at The School of Life. Her work has been well-received by the field of mainstream personal development and she was invited to chair the One in Five panel on mental health for Women of the World 2018 at Southbank Center. She has also featured on The Diary of a CEO podcast. She runs sell-out workshops in London and is regularly asked to speak publicly on behavioural change, mental health and addiction.

Book preview

introduction

The last time you ever start from scratch again

I’m going to show you how to enjoyably manage your weight for the rest of your life, and I’ll do it without telling you what to eat. Because, both from my personal experience of losing 112 pounds and through my professional experience of working in addiction treatment, I know that telling people how and why they should change is not effective. As a behavioral change specialist in private practice, I help people to achieve their weight-loss goals, whatever they may be, in whatever way best suits their bodies and lives.

I suspect you already know how to literally lose weight, and if you don’t, then the briefest of Google searches will bring up all the nutritional information and dietary guidance you need to lose weight sensibly. The basic formulas for safe and effective weight management are widely available and our pool of effective diet options is growing every day.

So, if the problem isn’t knowing what you need to do, or knowing how to do it, then why haven’t you done it yet? These are the questions that this book is here to help you to answer, and your responses will enable you to create a weight-management plan that is specifically tailored to your needs. One that has your overall wellbeing in mind.

We often underestimate the amount of thought that is needed in order to create a truly sustainable default way of eating for someone who has always struggled. We make the mistake of thinking that simply desire, desperation or visible results are enough to keep some people on track.

I imagine that the reason you bought this book is to understand why you even need it. I suspect it’s not knowledge of a specific diet you’re looking for, but self-knowledge. That’s why, when it comes to helping plan the specifics of what you’ll be eating or not eating to lose and maintain weight, I won’t profess to know what choices are best for your body. Instead I will simply provide the guidance you need to draw out your own wisdom. The Last Diet needs you to get on board with the belief that, regardless of why you want to lose weight, how much you want to lose or what practical route you choose to take, your results won’t be sustained in a meaningful way unless you commit to:

Liking yourself more every day

Getting to know yourself better every day

Believing in yourself more every day

People often believe that they’ll only be capable of doing these things once they’ve reached a goal weight or size. Quite the opposite is true. Starting to be kinder to yourself immediately (regardless of your weight) will make weight-loss goals easier to achieve—although you may have to change your definition of what being kinder means, but we’ll come to that later. For many of you, redefining what kind decisions are when it comes to our bodies will bring about the biggest shift in how you see weight loss.

I hope that one day, weight-loss books will simply be evidence-based updates of food and exercise guidance for those who want to literally lose fat from their bodies for whatever reason is important to them. Perhaps because they’re prone to putting on weight easily, and they’d just prefer not to, for their own good reasons. As it stands however, almost all of the conversations I have with people about their struggles to shift unwanted weight feature themes like low self-esteem, negative body image and self-sabotage. Luckily though, things seem to be going in the right direction. People are starting to realize what I’ve seen to be the case over and over again: believing you’re entitled to be happy regardless of your size is actually what helps you to be a size you’re happy with.

So, with that in mind, The Last Diet is a kinder weight-loss plan, that focuses on written exercises designed to increase your self-esteem and self-awareness, not simply physical exercises designed to make you lose fat. This book will help you to design a long-term eating, exercise and wellbeing routine—on purpose. One with self-created guidelines that you’re OK with following, even when it’s difficult. Because it’s much harder to rebel against your diet when you know you created it yourself, and that you put in a lot of work to make sure it’s the one with your overall best interests at heart.

Although the word diet gets a bad rap, it needn’t only be associated with fads and miracle cures. Of course your diet will play a part in the process of you losing weight and keeping it off. The same way it will have played a part in you gaining weight or not being able to keep it off. Your diet is simply a description of things you consume. In this sense, you’re always on a diet, it just may not be a predictable one, or one that you’ve chosen on purpose.

This book is for those who want to create their diet on purpose. Those who have come to realize that without some basic guidelines to follow, their current automatic eating habits will result in their bodies looking and feeling a way they’re not happy with. Some people will conclude through the exploratory, preparatory exercises in this book that they can create broad, loose guidelines, while others will decide they need more specific ones.

Some people will never need a book like this. They can’t understand how anyone would feel they need to follow self-imposed rules that keep them from enjoying the relatively harmless joy and comfort that food is, whenever they like, and just knowing when to stop. From my experience, these people tend to fall into one of these two categories. Some fall into both. I was always particularly jealous of those people:

People who can eat however and whatever they choose, and be content with how those choices make them look and feel

People who, regardless of what’s going on in their lives, are able to make natural and spontaneous choices for their bodies that are in their best interests long term

You may find it impossible to imagine you could ever belong to one of these categories. But I truly believe that we all can, some of us just need extra help staying in them. I now consider myself to exist in one of those categories most of the time. That said, I still sometimes have to remember that I wasn’t always one of those people, and that in order to avoid subtly gaining unwanted weight long term, I’ll always need simple default eating guidelines to fall back on.

Throughout this book, I use examples from my own experience of struggling with losing weight and keeping it off. I also draw on the stories of clients I’ve met through my private practice and habit-change workshops. You will read jargon-free explanations of the approaches I learned working in addiction treatment; motivational concepts that I’ve seen change people’s entire lives for the better. You’ll understand why, as soon as I realized the same concepts work for weight loss, I became dedicated to telling everyone about them immediately.

In essence, if you learn the fundamentals of motivation and good planning, you will always feel equipped to understand and change unwanted habits that may emerge around food and exercise, for the rest of your life, without handing yourself over to an expert who needs time to get to know you. The ultimate way of eating you create during this process will eventually become your new normal. But maybe in five years your body or your routine will change, or life circumstances will mean that you can’t stick to the same plan anymore. Or you just don’t want to. If and when that happens, you can return to the exercises in this book to find everything you need to create a new plan that suits your needs.

For some people, losing weight using this book will be a very simple and practical process of planning things like food choices more consciously and making sure they stay motivated until their new habits can be trusted to their autopilot. Their inability to maintain the weight they want isn’t caused by anything much deeper than what they eat and how much they do or don’t move around; in other words, their unwanted eating habits aren’t wrapped up in strong emotional needs, current or historical. Perhaps they simply associate food with fuel, joy and comfort, but some of the food types and quantities they eat happen to be making them gain or maintain unwanted weight. Perhaps they don’t believe any of their value lies in whether they are slim. But it’s of course still their prerogative to look how they like, and they just happen to want to be slimmer. Maybe they’ve never needed to diet in the past but their bodies just aren’t playing ball with the status quo anymore.

I was never one of these people. The way I’m made up physically means I’ve always naturally gained weight very quickly. Still, I always knew that staying overweight was largely due to what I ate, and most importantly why and how I ate it. How much I moved around played a part too, but not such a big one. Throughout my life, there have been a number of reasons why I have eaten in ways that make me gain weight, ranging from:

Frequent snacking and bingeing on large quantities of unquestionably fattening foods in an attempt to relieve anxiety, stress and low mood

Loving fattening foods and finding them extremely comforting

Unconsciously wanting to stay overweight

Yo-yo dieting and extended bingeing in response to falling off track with restrictive plans

A childhood spent scheming to get my hands on forbidden fattening foods

Abusing food to relieve myself from the realization that I was abusing food

Never establishing what a healthy, normal way to eat was for my body

How it works

You will use the guidance provided in this book to create a normal way to eat that suits your needs, based on undisputed, common sense principles. Regardless of your current eating style, this process includes the elements we can all agree are a good idea in the short and long term, like:

Staying hydrated

Eating vegetables

Not staying hungry for long

Eating a variety of foods

Eating mindfully and enjoying the process of eating

Not consuming large amounts of sugar

Not eating in ways that make you feel anxious or in a low mood

Not eating in ways that make you feel tired or sluggish

Not eating compulsively

Eating in ways that give you sustained energy as opposed to a quick hit

Eating in ways that help you feel focused and energetic

Eating in ways that give your body a sense of true nourishment

Essentially, The Last Diet is an opportunity to learn how to make choices for your body and mind that you’d want a loved one to make for theirs. That is the most important habit you will develop during this entire process, and the one that will make it most meaningful across every area of your life, as well as helping you to achieve your weight-loss goals.

my story

I know you because I am you

The Last Diet was created largely from my experience in two main areas:

A lifelong struggle with my weight

A career in addiction treatment

There’s no denying it, I was a chubby baby. At some point in my childhood, I started realizing that my body was causing concern to those around me. When I was around nine years old, my mother began worrying that my weight was becoming an issue. So she started changing what she cooked at home and drawing my attention to the things I ate that I shouldn’t eat so much of. She didn’t tell me outright that it was because those foods were causing me to gain weight and that gaining weight was a bad thing. And, as a child, I simply picked up on the fact that there was now a new way to be good or bad. This was the first time I realized that some foods were naughty and that eating them would make people unhappy with me.

I had already started to suspect something was up. I remember kids in junior school asking me why I was bigger than them. I remember being in a school uniform shop once when I was about ten and the shop assistant telling my mum that the sizes didn’t go up any higher, and that she’d have to start altering my skirts. My mum then started to sew extra panels into the side and, when I went to school, I realized that parts of my skirt were a very slightly different shade to other girls’.

As I became more aware that there was something wrong with me, I became more dependent on behaviors like bingeing and secret eating that would cause me to gain a lot of weight very quickly. As soon as I had a chance to consume the foods that my mother had controlled at home to slow down my weight gain, I would eat them like there was no tomorrow. I would obsess over getting my hands on them and strategize to ensure I could be alone with them. I would lie about how much of them I had eaten. I’m not proud to admit the lengths I’d go to for a hit of the forbidden foods. And it was very much a hit, because that’s the other force that was embedding my dependency on the forbidden foods: they were very high in sugar and fat. Food addiction was a very real part of my life before I understood what it was or indeed that it even existed.

In a similar way to what happens with many drugs, my tolerance grew and eventually I needed more of those hits more frequently to get my fix. As a result, I continued to gain weight at a rapid pace. By the time I was about twelve, the GP was telling me I was obese, and I had already grown very accustomed to being told by my peers that I was fat (and that being fat was a bad thing).

During secondary school, I started believing that boys didn’t fancy fat girls and fat girls aren’t popular unless they’re funny or have something else to bring to the table. These assumptions began to turn into a self-fulfilling belief, where for example I would choose to stay at home and binge instead of going to a party, because I decided that while I was fat, I wasn’t going to have much fun. TV shows and movies didn’t help either. It seemed to be a very common storyline that it wasn’t until someone lost weight that they became desirable, popular and

Reviews for The Last Diet.

[Oseno Osagie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great read. Really taught me a lot and there are many practical lessons which makes it even better.